Hong Kong secure semi-final place as the round-robin draws to a close

The women’s round-robin stage drew to a close at the Pacific-Asia Curling Championships 2018 being held in Gangneung, Republic of Korea and saw Hong Kong secure the last remaining semi-final place.

With the last semi-final place on the line, Australia and Hong Kong met in this morning’s final woman’s round-robin session.

In the second end, Hong Kong were sitting two shot stones, when skip, Ling-Yue Hung threw a draw to the button attempting to score three. However, she was just light with the draw and only managed to score two points for the 2-1 lead.

Hong Kong then went on to steal single points in the next three ends to take a 5-1 lead into the break.

Australia recovered in the second half and with a single point score in the ninth end they reduced the gap to 5-6.

In the tenth end, Hung was left with an open hit to score three points for the 9-5 win and a place in the semi-finals.

Afterwards a delighted Hung said, “I am totally elated, I’m elated for the team, it’s great for Hong Kong, the country, since we don’t have any ice, and I mean this is a great accomplishment. When I made that tick it was like “yes” for that last end. It was very-very tight. I had my draw weight, the sweepers were really very focused and understood all the different paths for the draw weight and that was I think the key for the game.”

Japan faced Korea in this session and despite only scoring in three ends, kept their unbeaten record intact with a 7-4 win.

After blanking the first end, Japan skip Satsuki Fujisawa played a double take-out with her last stone of the second end to score three points. Then in the fifth end, facing one Korean counter, on the button, Fujisawa played a precise hit and roll and managed to keep her shooter in the house to score a further three points and take a 6-2 lead.

Japan’s scored a single point in the ninth end before running Korea out of stone sin the tenth end for their win.

After the game, Fujisawa said, “We’re extremely happy, actually this is probably the first time that we won all the round-robin games. We won’t stop here, but we’ll concentrate more on the semi-final round. We’ll take a good rest for sure, but we won’t loosen ourselves and we’ll try to maintain our level of attention for the semi-final.”

The final game in this session saw Kazakhstan beat Qatar, 11-1 after six ends.

The women’s competition continues with the first semi-final featuring China v Korea at 19:00 Korea Standard Time later this evening.

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